Maeko wasn't sure when the tide had come in. But it had and she had gone from ankle-deep to above waist-deep without noticing while she was stood here and the sundress she had pulled over her swimsuit was soaked though. The cheap flipflops she had left at the water's edge when she waded in had long been claimed by the waves.
The salt water had stung her hands, breaking her concentration briefly as it soaked into the bandages but she was used to it now. It was a little cold but again, she was used to it by now. And it felt like here, something was protecting her from it.
And something was happening that had terrified her for the last few months, all the time she'd been fighting. The one thing she'd feared more than anything else, the thing she'd taken comfort in its not happening even as her skin cracked and peeled. And this time, there was no danger in it.
The witch had fallen silent.
That screaming in the back of her mind, the rage that had always been there but that she had decided was a part of herself that she didn't want and so had dubbed 'the witch'. It had stopped. And it wasn't just an absence like it had been before. It was just calm. The witch had nothing to scream about. And what replaced it was...silence wasn't the word. Silence was a word she associated with that absence. With harshness. With things being forbidden. With a sense she had being unusable. This was calm. Safe. Not so much an absence of sound as in invitation for her to speak. The first time in her life she'd really felt like she was being invited to speak.
And she still wasn't.
She just didn't really have all that much to say to the water.
The water wouldn't care that this one person in a soaked sundress and a swimsuit and no shoes was confused and kind of lost and tired of fighting and fighting and coming back with nothing but exhaustion to show from it. It wouldn't care that trying didn't work no matter how hard or how many times she tried when others had what she aimed for without doing a thing and still complained. It didn't matter to the water so much that she almost compulsively pushed people she wanted near to her as far away as possible or that she couldn't respond to anything with anything but fear and hostility or that everyone around her was moving on from their problems after going to that place – Toru was gradually getting more confident than he had seemed to be at first when she'd bullied him into helping with the computers, Misaki was standing up to her mother, Tom had gone so far as to call her a friend – and if she was changing at all she was only getting worse. She had problems now that she'd never had imagined before, all as a result of trying to solve the problems she had in the first place (which she still had made no progress on). And the water wouldn't care that it was all her fault or that the only potential answers she could find were in a book of children's stories.
Since it was, after all, just water. It didn't care much more than the rest of the world did.
And Maeko was never really one to burden others with her problems anyway, especially when they had enough to worry about already what with all the fish and the pollution and melty ice caps and stuff to worry about. If water worried. (It might! she justified to herself, sounding altogether to defensive in her head.)
Just because she was able to talk didn't mean she should, after all.
Almost reluctantly, she headed out of the safety of the sea back up to the sand, finding her flipflops were indeed gone. And with the influence of whatever was in the water calming her down gone, she was cold and grumpy and sand was sticking to her and only one thought came to mind.
Stupid dumb thieving jerk of a jerk of a tide. You'll get yours.